Learning from the Balance of Nature

Throughout the course of designing TreeHAUS, my Solar Decathlon team and I made frequent visits to Crumpacker woods, a grove of old growth forest adjacent to our proposed site. This sometimes included meeting with world-renowned tree physiology expert Dr. John Seiler from the College of Natural Resources and Environment (CNRE) here at Virginia Tech. Our visits accomplished two things. First and most obvious, we applied lessons from the forest to the design of TreeHAUS systems. For example, the way water is collected and distributed, using the forest as a sponge to prevent combined sewage overflow. Energy and food systems are also modeled on the distribution of photosynthate between trees through fungal mycorrhizal networks beneath the forest floor, and Nature’s ‘know no waste’ nutrient cycling informing our food waste anaerobic digestion to bio-gas back up power.

The second thing I noticed during these visits to the woods was how much more engaged and excited my fellow teammates became about learning. Their love of learning seemed instantly more animated and bolder. Something about swapping whiteboards for tree trunks, or commercial carpet for a bed of leaves. Something about using millions of years of evolution as your teacher. Something about the environment of being in a forest lowering stress levels and eliciting really thoughtful, creative questions. As Dr. Seiler led us through the site and explained the threat of invasive species on the forest edge and the legacy of 400 year old white oaks, I realized a lesson seemingly much more obvious. It is not just about what we learn, but where we learn it. The experiential element is crucial. A classroom may actually be one of the worst environments in which to learn. We have to slowly start phasing out spaces designed for learning and start bringing the learning to the scene of the subject matter itself.

Well-being on Both Sides of Design

I never realized how hard it would be to live out the principals of my own design. I just finished my first semester of leading a large team of students in the Solar Decathlon Design Competition. The attached housing project we developed was brimming with biophilic features to improve the health and wellness of future occupants. Our phyto-remediative greenwall filters indoor air by forcing it through the roots and soil of each planter. Wood-wool fiber acoustic insulation inserted in between our dowell laminated timber (DLT) ceiling actively sequesters VOCs from the environment. The floor plans were designed intentionally to provide equitable access to daylight, natural ventilation, and outdoor space. Even tree placement in the landscape was optimized to cast shadows of leaves on the floors and walls of each apartment- creating opportunities for indoor forest bathing in what the Japanese call ‘komorebi’ - or the way in which sunlight shines through the leaves of a tree.

Interior Rendering of TreeHAUS, Virginia Tech’s entry in the Attached Housing division of the 2019 Solar Decathlon Design Challenge.

With so much concern for providing a stress-free environment for future tenants, many of us on the design team neglected our own personal health and wellness for several months. Seemingly endless stretches of all-nighters left us completely drained around all of the major submission deadlines. After submitting the final report at the last possible second, I literally collapsed onto the floor of my research lab partly in relief and joy but mosltly out of pure exhaustion. Fundraising to send our largest ever team to compete in the finals at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado was also wrought with stress. You can see in the video below how little sleep I had been getting throughout the whole project.

And so we created this beautiful, peaceful, mindful oasis in which graduate students and future faculty could live their most balanced lives, just as we neglected our own balance in the process. I have thought a lot about what contributed to this.

1. The way we select teams neglects how well a candidate balances their work with other healthy habits: I selected my team leaders for their portfolios and their portrayed talent without ever asking them about work-life balance. In the end I ended up working with someone who exacerbated my own tendencies toward perfectionism. Though we excelled in the competition, there are many ways in which we could have been better to ourselves throughout the process.

2. Ambition must be balanced with time management: It is okay to have high standards and lofty goals of success. In fact, I admire those qualities in myself and in others. The problem arises when big ambition meets poor time management skills. We needed to freeze the design of our building way earlier in the process. We needed to have harder internal deadlines that we really held ourselves to. Until a team develops a track record for good time management, it is impossible to be ambitious and mindful of your health at the same time.
   

Winning the competition is something I will never regret. All the hard work and the sleepless nights got us there. But we are all still learning. The real failure would not have been losing the competition, but rather neglecting to reflect on what could have been done better. In our case, we needed more balance and better time management. In the future I will seek teammates and leaders who bring these specific qualities to the table. Only in that way can we hope to breed well-being on both sides of Design.

Female Pioneers in Higher Education

I want to expand here a bit on the work of Fatima Al-Fihri and her founding of The University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fes, Morocco in 859 CE. This was glanced over in a previous post about the structure of educational institutions and their history, but I do not feel it was given enough emphasis. For those of you who do not grasp the importance of this let me reiterate: THE FIRST EVER UNIVERSITY WAS FOUNDED BY A FEMALE. It is incredible to me how backwards we went as a society since that moment. It would be much more believable in my mind if the struggle for educational access after Al Quaraouiyine was a male struggle; if it took men more than a millennium to earn their right to equitable education in a female dominated domain.

Instead, our patriarchal society took hold of a female’s brainchild; and the men in charge managed to keep women out of the fold. It was not until 1840 that Catherine Brewer earned the first female bachelor’s degree in the United States from Wesleyan College in Georgia. At Virginia Tech, women did not enroll until 1921, nearly half a century after the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute was founded. In 1923, Mary Brumfield was the first woman to receive a degree. Even today when male and female enrollment and admission in colleges and universities are more equal than they have ever been, I have to ask myself- what would Fatima Al-Fihri have thought. Could we have skipped those 1160 years of educational inequity if we only acknowledged the genius of her gender from the very beginning of higher education’s existence.